Ground-truth reqs

A single req can appear dozens of times across the web: syndicated to job boards, re-posted by staffing agencies, mirrored by aggregators, each copy stamped with a new date and a slightly different title. Work from those copies and you over-count demand, mis-date it, and attribute it to the wrong company. Ground truth is the concept of anchoring back to the original req so a company's hiring is counted once, as the employer stated it.

Treating ground truth as a defined standard — not a marketing adjective — is what makes a hiring-intent dataset auditable: every signal should trace to a specific, resolvable requisition rather than to an aggregator row of unknown provenance. It is the difference between a signal you can defend and a number you can only assert.